Finally, we came to a small town, its main street lined with shady oaks. It was a peaceful town, and I didn’t want to burden it with my troubles.
I looked at the map again. Eleanor peered over my shoulder.
“That’s Orlando.” She touched the map with her finger. “We could keep going on this road and we’d be in Orlando.”
“Why would be want to do that?” I asked.
Eleanor laughed. She had a wonderful laugh, so filled with reckless joy. “Silly. You know.”
I told her I really didn’t know.
“That’s where Disney World is!” she shouted. “We could see Mickey Mouse, and Donald, and Cinderella’s Castle and Frontier Town.” She paused. “Lou said he would take me, but he never did.”
Well, I thought, that’s my fault. “I’m sure he meant to,” I said.
Then I thought: Why not? Maybe it was just what I needed. Maybe I could talk to Mickey—or Goofy (I think Goofy was always my favorite). I might find Goofy there on Main Street, just standing around, and I could ask him for a minute of his time, and we could sit on the curb, and I could say: “I can’t make any sense of it. I’m frankly out of my element. What do you think? Give me your honest opinion. What do you recommend?”
It wasn’t much of a plan. I admit that. But it was the best I could do.
“We are going to Disney World,” I told Eleanor.
Eleanor squealed with pleasure and I accelerated some, blasting through brittle fields of sunlight, frightening a tattered crow from its roadside kill, and feeling, for the moment, a renewed sense of mission, however spurious, however fleeting.
Snow
Youth is fraught with moral ambiguity. Huge appetites war with high ideals. As one gets older, one’s appetites abate somewhat and the moral absolutes get muddied. But there is a tricky period there when young. You wish to think well of yourself while availing yourself of every pleasure in your path.
I was thinking of this yesterday after a student of mine propositioned me. I am a bald, middle-aged man, thirty pounds overweight. I have sinus trouble and tend to walk about with my mouth open so that when I encounter a mirror I am shocked to see an anxious fish of a human gulping for air. I am not—it goes without saying—propositioned often. I teach economics at a small college. I am not a charismatic teacher. Still, sexual attraction is always a curious and surprising phenomenon. This young woman, blonde and pretty, made it clear that she would not be averse to a sexual encounter.
As tactfully as possible, I told her that I was happily married, and that I was flattered but could not accept her kind offer.
In fact—and this is the sad wisdom of middle-age—I knew it would be too much trouble. My life is a series of routines and small expectations that are consistently met. I did not want to jeopardize that.
It wasn’t a moral decision at all; it was a decision based on convenience and comfort. Suddenly, these thoughts conjured up the pale, intense face of Alfred Davidson and immediately—the camera of my imagination panning to the right—I saw the smiling, lavishly-freckled face of Sadie Thompson. In my imagination, she was standing slightly behind Davidson and was preparing to shoot him with a rubber band.
I met Davidson and Sadie in the winter of 1967. I had graduated from college that year and obtained work with an accounting firm (Kimberly and Colson) with offices in Washington D.C. In October, we won a government contract, found ourselves severely understaffed, and hired a number of college students—about a dozen I think—to come in in the afternoons.
I was aware of Sadie from the day she started work. She was a plump red-headed girl, with blue eyes and freckles who laughed easily and musically and was inclined to touch you when she talked. An air of suppressed sexual excitement enveloped her, and Fred Ohlson told me, the second week after her arrival, that he was in love with her.
Fred also warned me about Alfred Davidson. “Look out for that guy. He’s a pre-mini.”
Pre-mini? I was unaware of the term. Fred explained that Davidson—one of our newly hired college students—planned to attend seminary after graduation in the spring; was a pre-ministerial student or, in the shorthand of his more secular colleagues, a pre-mini.
I had not yet met Davidson, so I could not form my own opinion. Fred added, “He’s out to get me,” which seemed an odd thing to say on several counts. Fred had worked at Kimberly and Colson for two years and was well-liked. Since he was nobody’s boss and did his job competently, it was hard to imagine him inspiring this sort of antagonism. But stranger yet was the notion—implicit in the solemnity with which Fred announced Davidson’s intentions—that a part-time employee who had been at the firm for only two weeks could entertain the thought of “getting” Fred, a valued worker.
“Aren’t you being a little paranoid?” I said.
“You haven’t met Davidson, Alec. Wait till you meet the guy. He’s bad news.”
I was to meet Davidson a mere three days later when he came to occupy the desk next to mine. I did not know that this was the young man that Fred had warned me about. I observed a skinny, intense fellow with a severe haircut, full, pouty lips, and heavy-lidded eyes that conveyed a truculent air of disdain. He wore a dark suit that was just a bit too small for him, and he did not introduce himself to me, but began stapling bundles of paper together in a frenzy of activity. Thump. Slap. Thump. Slap. Occasionally a staple would misfire, and he would utter one of what I soon discovered was a vast horde of swear-substitutes: “Jeepers!” Thump. “Golly darn!” Thump. Slap. “Jiminy Crickets!” Slap. “Miniver Cheever! Rats! Bog water!”
When he ran out of staples, he spoke to me.
“I’m Alec Macphail,” I said, handing him some staples.
He took the staples. “Alfred Davidson,” he muttered, head down as he struggled to open the stapler.
“You push here, then pull back,” I said, demonstrating. He followed my instructions, the device popped open, and he looked up and thanked me—reluctantly, I think; I got the impression that he was unhappy being the recipient of any assistance, feeling perhaps that it placed him in a position of obligation.
On his break, Davidson wolfed down a baloney sandwich and then gnawed on an apple while studying what was unmistakably a Bible. He would draw in on himself while reading it, his thin body stiff with sanctity.
In the days that followed, we rarely spoke to each other but I came to loathe him despite our limited social commerce. Listening to his muttered spurious oaths (“Dang nab! Rats! Phooey! Bobby socks!”) I found myself longing to throttle him. I could not explain this intense dislike to myself, and I was relieved when events gave me more solid reasons for despising him.
In the meantime, I found that I too was becoming enamored of Sadie Thompson. She was an incongruous addition to our office, rather like discovering a songbird in some dank catacomb—and a fearless songbird at that, for she sang as though unaware of the grim, matronly women who curdled at her approach or the disapproving older clerks—the male equivalent of spinsters—who grimaced every time she said “fuck.” And Sadie said “fuck,” or more precisely “fucking,” a lot. She was serenely unaware of the effect this had on others, merely using the word to fill out sentences, to give body to statements that seemed, otherwise, oppressively flat. Thus she might say, “The fucking snow has fucking ruined these fucking shoes.” She seemed so unmindful of this word that I liked to imagine her being raised in a household where soft-voiced solicitous parents urged the tiny child to eat her fucking peas if she wanted her fucking dessert or to please turn the fucking TV off as it was time to go to fucking bed.
I was not the only one in love with Sadie. There was Fred, of course, and several others. Almost arbitrarily—on a good-humored whim, as it were—Sadie had awarded her favors to Lonnie Wilson, an unfortunate choice as far as the rest of us were concerned. Lonnie was a handsome, conceited lout who fancied himself quite a womanizer and began, immediately, to tell the rest of us the precise nature of his relationship to Sadie. The relationship was sexual and ac
robatic.
We all despised Lonnie’s candor in these matters, but it was left to Fred, miserable and half-mad with unrequited love and jealousy, to express his displeasure.
One day our receptionist, Mrs. Alabaster, was shocked when the elevator door opened on our floor to reveal Lonnie and Fred—both wearing the obligatory business suits—rolling on the floor. Fred was on top and hitting Lonnie in the face, but Lonnie, by far the larger of the two, appeared to be slowly strangling Fred with Fred’s own tie. According to Mrs. Alabaster, Fred’s face was bright red.
Our manager, Mr. Horn, spoke to the combatants, warning them that a reccurrence of such unseemly behavior would lead to their immediate dismissal.
The incident had inspired Davidson to comment.
“What people fail to understand,” he said, “is that only the love and fear of God can defeat our animal natures.” Davidson nodded his head, as though I had agreed with him. He paused, and his face elongated with moral censure. “You know, Fred Ohlson is an atheist. He is a man actively pursuing Satan’s directives. The first day I arrived here, I saw him reading a copy of a magazine devoted to the promotion of a godless society.”
“What magazine was that?” I asked, but Davidson didn’t answer, being distracted by Sadie, who had come up behind him and was mussing his hair.
“Please cut that out,” Davidson said.
For reasons that have always eluded me, some women are drawn to priggish men, and Sadie had started a game of teasing Davidson. Davidson’s confusion and frustration were obvious. He blushed.
“Oh Reverend,” Sadie giggled in his ear. “You really rev my engine.” She darted away, and Davidson looked around him with the sort of expression I’d seen on dogs caught urinating on the carpet.
It snowed a lot that November, and I seemed to be always digging my car out, scraping ice from the windows, sitting in its frozen interior and listening to the starter cough. The sound always made my chest ache, like listening to an old man with emphysema hack his way through another morning cigarette.
I hated the blackness of mornings, and I felt cold all the time, for the fine dust of frozen snow that lived in the wind would get under my collar and into my shoes. Once chilled, I could not warm myself until I took a hot shower in the evening.
In this dismal state, I found the office insipid. In December, a Christmas tree appeared five feet from my desk, and its artificial cheeriness made suicide seem attractive. I had written my parents telling them I would arrive on the twentieth, but as that day approached and the drive to Pennsylvania through bad weather grew nearer, I contemplated excuses for not going.
Sadie dumped Lonnie, effortlessly and cheerfully, and took up with another office worker, a quiet young man named Webb who was a dark horse in the race for Sadie’s affections.
Fred grew yet more despondent, cursing himself for not acting in that instant when Lonnie ceased to have residence in Sadie’s heart and Webb had not yet entered.
I tried to console Fred. “It couldn’t have been more than a few milliseconds,” I said. I had not told him of my own growing infatuation with Sadie. Fred had told me first, and there is an etiquette to these things.
I then witnessed an act of perfidy on the part of Davidson. At the time I witnessed the act, I did not understand its nature and was at a loss to explain the guilty expression on Davidson’s face. All I saw, in fact, was Davidson rooting avidly through Fred’s wastebasket, suddenly shouting “Ha!” and retrieving a crumpled piece of paper. Turning to see me studying him, Davidson started, smiled sheepishly, and said, “I almost threw away something I shouldn’t have.”
I wondered at the time how he had come to discard something in Fred’s wastebasket, since’s Fred’s desk was on the opposite side of the room. But it wasn’t one of those things that occupies the mind for long, and I soon forgot it.
One week later, Fred was called into Mr. Horn’s office. When he returned from that conference, he was noticeably subdued, and I asked him what had happened. He explained.
He had thrown out one of Mrs. Warden’s letters. Every business that deals with the public has to deal with a certain crazed, demonically-inspired segment. Mrs. Wardell was a wealthy and eccentric client who lived to inflict pain and suffering on the businesses she dealt with. Her letters were not entirely sane creations, but they always required the performance of arduous and ultimately meaningless tasks. Fred Ohlson had been performing these tasks regularly—and now the letters came addressed to him. His duty was clear, and it is no good excuse to say that he was distracted by a broken heart. It is no excuse to say that he was tempted by the knowledge—demonstrated on other occasions—that a failure to respond would end the matter since Mrs. Wardell penned letters in the heat of the moment and then forgot them.
In any event, Fred crumpled this particular letter and tossed it in the wastebasket. Mr. Horn asked if Fred knew of the existence of such a letter, and Fred denied such knowledge. The letter was then produced, and Fred’s protestations—shrill with outrage—failed to impress his boss.
“Here is the letter,” Mr. Horn said. “It is clear what it requires. Please get on with it.”
Fred was convinced that Davidson had seen him toss the letter, had retrieved it, and had brought it to Horn’s attention.
I realized that this was, in fact, what I had seen, but I still hesitated to confirm Fred’s suspicions. I wrestled with this reticence for a week, and then the whole matter proved irrelevant.
Every business initiates certain rules which seem arbitrary and senseless. Kimberly and Colson demanded that employees stay in the building during breaks. Employees were free to roam the city during their lunch hours, but management was adamant that no one leave the building during the two allotted fifteen-minute breaks. Like most rules, no one knew exactly why this one had been initiated. Fred considered it a particularly foolish injunction, and so he chose to ignore it. This was easy enough to do, since a fire exit door was next to his desk. He could slip out—being careful to insert a pencil between the door and the door frame—skip down the three flights of stairs to the ground floor street exit, and grab a doughnut and a cup of coffee from Mocha’s on the corner.
A week after Fred’s visit to Mr. Horn’s office, I looked up in time to see Davidson scurrying back to his desk. Minutes later a loud banging attracted our attention, and we all watched as Mr. Horn marched solemnly across the office and opened the fire door. Fred, holding a cup of coffee, smiled ruefully.
This was a minor infraction—not in itself any job-jeopardizing event. But later that afternoon, as I made a pot of coffee, I looked back across the long room, across all those bowed, droning heads, and I saw Fred, wonderfully animate, leaning over Davidson’s desk. The scene had many of the best qualities of classic silent films. The gestures were broad; emotions were clearly written on the faces of the participants, and action spoke as articulately as words. I watched Fred snatch a pencil off the desk and hold it up in front of Davidson’s face. The caption here was “Do you recognize this?” Davidson backed away in the best tradition of villains, even throwing one arm across his chest, as though wielding a black cape. Fred leaned forward, grabbed Davidson by his shirt, and yanked him across the desk. Fred began hitting Davidson, wild, windmilling punches, and Davidson, rather than fight, curled up on the floor. Horn, Mrs. Alabaster, and a number of other employees came running. Davidson was moaning loudly, a sound so irritating that I confess to hoping Fred would quickly pummel him into unconsciousness.
The fight was broken up, and Fred was fired. He was, after all, the common denominator in two recent brawls.
I was sorry to see him go. Watching him clean his desk out was a sad business. He offered me a copy of Playboy, but I declined. In the following weeks, I met Fred once or twice for drinks. At these times he would vow to kill Davidson, but nothing came of it and one day he left to visit his brother in New Jersey. I never saw him again.
With reservations, I made the trip to Pennsylvania and spent Christm
as with my family. We were all there: my younger brother, Joe, my older sister, Rachel, my parents, various uncles and aunts and cousins.
The holiday made me edgy and I was impatient to get back to my own apartment, my own simple routines. I suspect that I have a mild form of agoraphobia, since this desire to return to my apartment asserts itself on every vacation I’ve ever taken.
I drove home in a snowstorm. At times, I seemed to drive through a sheer, luminous whiteness, occasionally passing some car abandoned in a ditch. I felt oddly safe in my heated vehicle, oddly invulnerable as the windshield wipers thunked back and forth. I thought about the few conversations I had had with Sadie and the way she leaned forward and touched me when she talked and the way she used her eyebrows to convey a rich, erotic subtext. Reviewing these conversations, I thought it probable that she liked me, that something might very well develop if I asked her out. She never seemed all that excited about Webb, and there was every possibility that that romance was already on the rocks. The more I thought about it, the more likely it seemed. Webb had recently been looking sort of weepy and petulant and on more than one occasion I had seen him regarding his paramour, as she flirted with one or another of us office drones, with sunken eyes that contained either anger or despair, perhaps both. Now that I thought about it, I remembered Webb actually dragging Sadie away from—of all people to be jealous of!—the dour Davidson whom Sadie had been gaily pelting with rubber bands.
I was home in time to attend the New Year’s Eve office party thrown annually by Mr. Colson, who owned a mansion in McLean. I hate parties, but I knew that Sadie would be there—without Webb. For once I had read the signs correctly. Sadie had dumped poor Webb, who had been so shaken and demoralized by this event that he had failed to come to work, had neglected even to call in, and, when reached on the phone by Mr. Horn, had sounded drunk and insisted that Horn put Sadie on the line. Horn had refused, words had been exchanged, and Webb no longer worked for Kimberly and Colson.
The Return of Count Electric & Other Stories Page 14
